Bumph Box

The latest monster egg from Gladys. We thought these had stopped and that she’d found her laying feet. We’ll see what tomorrow (or the day after that) brings.

…Share our favourite jazz album! Well, Wayne’s fave jazz album is my fave album of all time. Miles Davis – Bitches Brew. In last month’s Uncut magazine, Wayne does the ‘my life in music’ section where artists talk about the tunes that shape their lives. And it’s satisfying to see him choose this and describe it similar to how I do.

“Whenever I want to hear music that’s just a strange cacophony of sometimes melodic stuff, sometimes abstract stuff, i listen to that.”

I have it as my all time fave album not because of any personal relating to me lyrics or emotional chord structures – all the usual stuff I like music for – but for the complete whacked out trip I get by listening to it. It’s like real alien music – like nothing else I know – It makes me uncomfortable because it takes me places I don’t know, and that’s scary. No other music does this to me. It’s kaleidoscopic, fractured yet all together at the same time. If you haven’t heard it and you have an hour to yourself – put your headphones on and prepare for a journey to somewhere you never knew existed.

Here’s a blast from the album on Youtube

I wanted a tool which could help me record my moods at any given time. I’m wondering by being conscious of my moods or emotions and recording them, I could effectively control them or at least think about how they affect me and whether I can do anything differently etc. By recording all the data I can maybe get an idea of how grumpy I really am – maybe it should be called the Grumpometer.

Anyway, having a look at available apps (ideally I want to record stuff on the go) nothing really stood out and I thought I could probably knock something together using free existing tools. So, using a combination of Twitter, WordPress and Your Flowing Data. I have a basic mood tracker which can provide me extremely dull information about myself, as long as I remember to input my feelings.

When I want to record a mood, I go to the mood tracker page which I set up on this blog. That basically gives me a list of emotions to choose from. Choosing one of them fires a tweet direct to Your Flowing Data which records the details. You can add extra bits in at this point too. This gets added to the other data and makes it all available in a number of snazzy ways. So I could see how often I’ve been happy on a Monday, for instance.

I’m not really confident it will work due to my cockeyed approach to using tech stuff but we’ll see. It’s usually about having a bash at things. I guess it’s set up so anyone can give it a go if you set up a Your Flowing Data account and you’re on Twitter.

Add this link to your phone to record stuff on the go: http://bit.ly/grumpo. It just about works ok on my 3G I Phone.

Here’s my latest recorded emotion

For a fair few months now, my wife has had her heart on having a few chooks for the garden. Well, now it’s happened so let me please introduce to you, the latest additions to the family. Hilda (black) and Gladys (red). Sure to be the subject of much snapping in the coming months!

In many respects it’s one of the defining moments of any tournament your team plays in. Their first goal. It takes a weight off a nation’s shoulders, settles them down and offers hope for the rest of the tournament. And those who had invested in HD for these very moments, missed it thanks to the shambolic ITV sports team. I don’t care what or who was to blame. If it was a technical fault, how come they don’t have back up plans? this isn’t fucking beta. And I may be paranoid, but the news that Paddy Power offered odds of 8/1 on any game getting interrupted by ads on ITV just seemed too…. Maybe the person in control of the buttons was Scottish or something.

I built a memory vessel out of love – much more than a crate for growing salad, time will see to that.

I read a tweet from Labour MP, Tom Watson, about an article in the Guardian saying a fifth of young people have never received a letter. This was one of those small coincidences where I’ve had similar fears about writing letters, probably more so just putting ink to paper (or anything to paper for that matter). I’ve been receiving some mentoring for the business and during that process, it was suggested that I should get some of my old skool creativity back on track. Maybe get a band together, do some art or photography. I wanted to try something so stupidly simple first off though, just to see how I felt, and that was stop using the laptop for everything, including taking notes and start jotting stuff down in a notepad again. Amazing how something so simple could have such an effect. Not that it’s sent me down any mega mind blowingly creative path, just unblocked some weird little mental blockage which had started to make me uncomfortable. Call it creative constipation.

Anyways, following on from this, my Dad handed over a load of old family photographs a few months ago and I thought i’d have a bash at some online archive thing (which i’m still procrastinating over) but in amongst the photos were a few letters written to my Mom by my late sister, Jane who died at the age of 23 from leukaemia, back in 1986. Reading these obviously brought on a right old mix of emotions which eventually settled down to an overriding sense of joy. I thought then, it’s only letters that really have this power, they’re physical objects, personal, they age – really wonderful things. So I promised myself that I would write a letter to my boy at least once a month so that maybe he might feel that same sense of joy or something similar, however many years down the line. Also, he likes it when the postman delivers the letters at the moment so it’s nice that he gets something from time to time.

So, The wife returns from a hectic night’s work. Me and the boy need something to do on what plans to be a reasonable day, weather wise. He needs new sand for his sand pit and we need something for dinner later. So there’s a bit of a plan – tie in a visit to the park and I think we have the makings of a day. Just occurred to me, as I don’t really use this blog for that much – maybe I can use it in this way? Just as a daily or so, place for gubbins and ramblings – actually, that’s exactly what it was intended for!

As ever, looking at trying stuff that fits the old digital inclusion / engagement / participation mould, i’ve kicked off a hyperlocal blog (on the tumblr platform)  for where I live. It’s called ‘Roughly Roughley‘ and so far I’ve put a few links up to the MySociety stuff, bus timetables, weather and a SnapGroup.

I’m keen to watch how it takes off and develop, if I manage to get a number of contributors, to see what kind of stuff they want to put up there. I have a few people in mind initially to contribute but i’m currently thinking about building some recognition.

One of my concerns with the whole hyper local thing, is longevity. I wonder whether a year or two down the line, will we have a load of ‘ghost’ blogs where no one continues to contribute. It will be interesting to see how the sites are curated and if plans are put into place to ensure they continue to be used.

One of Solly’s Christmas presents last year was a JCB toy called Rex the Roller. Once I figured out what it was I got quite excited by the idea that JCB had done a range of toys based on their magical yellow monsters. However, that excitement soon waned as the toy itself was a letdown. No genuine feeling of character with ‘Rex’, shoddy graphics and overall unpleasant plasticness. Add to that an irritating click with each roll and poor geordie dialogue, I think JCB took the cheap route to bringing their agricultural, construction and material handling equipment into our family living rooms. Possibly one of the biggest missed opportunities I can think of. The real equipment had already won us over but now I feel somewhat cheated. Probably not fair to say as I haven’t seen the full range, but this experience has left me feeling that we may look elsewhere for such construction related fun in the future.

Click to hear Rex